New life for old shipping containers

The great English DJ John Peel once considered buying a used shipping container for underground storage of some of his vast record collection. (Instead he adopted a more conventional storage solution.) Other uses of old containers have recently emerged, including use as market stalls and housing. Links to many such projects can be found at Shipping Container Architecture.

The image (from boingboing) shows student housing in Amsterdam, constructed from containers.

More History of Container Shipping

The May issue of TRAINS Magazine has an article about White Pass & Yukon Route. The article has a small section about narrow-gauge container trains and the world's first container ship, White Pass & Yukon's 4,000 ton Clifford J. Rogers which predates Malcom McLean's Ideal-X by a year.

50 years of Container Shipping

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of container shipping.

Fifty years ago April 26, a trucker from rural North Carolina ran an experiment here that forever altered international trade and the global economy.

While many scoffed, Malcolm McLean hired a crane to hoist 58 trailer-sized steel cargo boxes onto a Texas-bound freighter. It was an alternative to the then-ubiquitous "break-bulk" shipping, the costly, pilferage-prone method dramatized in the film "On the Waterfront."
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Now, shipping everything from clothing to razor blades to electronics in secured metal containers is the norm. Breakage and theft have been dramatically curtailed, and average shipping costs have fallen from 15% of retail value to less than 1%. At the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's facilities in Newark, N.J. and Elizabeth, N.J., containerization accounts for 94% of the cargo, with break bulk about 1%; automobiles account for the remainder.